User blog:CerealBoxHead46/The Incredibles: A Queen, a Mole, a Whole Lotta Ice, and a Bunch of People Nobody Ever Heard of, part 2
What's up, guys! I hope everyone here had an awesome Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. I opted not to post the second half of my user blog last week because it could eclipse Roger's Black Friday deals blog. But now I'm back, and I have plenty more where that one came from. Last blog, I typed about Frozone's odd exclusion from The Incredibles Playset. This week, I am here to type about an odd inclusion to that same playset. I'd like to start off with a little trivia game. How many of you who watched The Incredibles remember how Syndrome ended up? A: He died.B: He got sucked into his plane's turbine.C: His plane blew up with him in it. Try D, all of the above. My point: Syndrome is very dead. That's it; he's gone. No faking that death. This is Buddy Pine we're talking about, not Batman. Which makes it all that much more puzzling as to why Syndrome made it into The Incredibles Playset. He's DEAD. What more can I say? He's DEAD!!!!! Of course, if you read my last blog, you know there were several minor characters who were resurrected for use in this playset without good reason. Syndrome at least makes more sense, because he was such a major character to this franchise. All the same, however, it's not like he was the only relevant bad guy who could have been used in this play set. The Incredibles franchise includes many villains. And they certainly didn't have to add him just for the sake of having a fifth character. (Frozone could have played that role easily.) Besides, he's the villain, for cryin' out loud. Why make the villain playable? Villains are for beating the pants off of, not for sympathizing with. Furthermore, am I the only one who thinks it's weird when a character can be used to battle himself, especially in a final boss battle? Don't get me wrong, here; Syndrome is pretty cool to play as, and I love that zero point energy. (Which could have been included without resurrecting Syndrome.) My issue is that this play set was based around a dead guy. Why? Just why? And I haven't even gone into the other three villains. Yes, the play set had four villains, remember? Baron Von Ruthless, The Hoarder, and Snoring Gloria. Oh, well no wonder you don't remember. All three of those guys were made up for the play set. Seriously? First no Frozone, now this? No other play set got the same kind of butchered treatment as this one. This is pathetic. The Incredibles franchise universe has literally TONS of ACTUAL bad guys they could have used. No, seriously. The last one's really not that far-fetched. Unhappy man, dislikes a super, said super beats him up and lands him in the hospital, he gets mad, vows revenge, finds out the super is a super, builds himself a giant robot suit, and becomes an evil, maniacal villain. Sounds like a prototypical Marvel origin story, right? Okay, fine, maybe not, but even Mr. Huff would have been less stupid than what we got. What we got were three lame excuses for preschool game supervillains. To call them villains is almost an insult to all the real villains everywhere who are rolling in their graves watching the pitiful spectacle of the villains of The Incredibles Playset. Let's just call them......... Vill-lames. Vill-lame #1: The Hoarder. This was JV's way of trying to create a villain with a little credibility by basing him off of a legitimate supervillain. He was clearly nothing more than a cheap knockoff of Marvel's villain from their hit movie Guardians of the Galaxy, The Collector. I know, this was before the movie or play set, but Mr. Tantileer Tivan was a villain in the comics long before any of this. So anyway, what is The Hoarder's "big superpower?" Why should the superhero community have feared him so? Why was this man/woman (with that hair, it's hard to tell) so wanted that it took supers to bring him down? He puts boxes around Metroville to trap people in. How terrifying. At least the REAL collector has that cool suspended animation technology. The Hoarder has glorified mouse traps. This guy doesn't belong in a SuperMax Prison; he should be doing community service for his juvenile crimes! And furthermore, even as tiny as they are, those little mega block cops should have had no trouble taking down him, of all people. Vill-lame #2: Snoring Gloria. This vill-lame is so named because she is so boring, she makes you fall asleep. Her superpower is growing giant plants that generate sedatives. That makes her a somnologist, not a supervillain. (Yawn)........Wake me when the bad guy shows up. Vill-lame #3: Baron Von Ruthless. Okay, with this guy, I actually have to give JV a little bit of credit for, number 1, inventing a somewhat-credible bad guy; and number two, for using a bad guy who actually has some form of connection to the movie, if almost none at all. Frozone did bring him up in his conversation with Bob in the car, but only for a moment. Plus, it can be inferred from his words that the Baron was long ago apprehended. Oh, well. At least he was (kind of) in the movie. So that being said, his guy is by far the worst of the three bad guys. How so? Glad you asked. The Baron has two superpowers. He is apparently a chemist, and he uses a special formula to turn ordinary townspeople into Frankenstein's monster. (A common misconception is that the monster is named Frankenstein; that was actually his creator's name.) His other superpower is that he can obtain flight powers by emitting gaseous fumes from his butt. Don't get it? I'll say it again: His other superpower is that he can obtain flight powers by emitting gaseous fumes from his butt. He flies by farting. HE. FLIES. BY. FARTING. When I saw it, I thought it had to be some kind of chemicals. I mean, he is a scientist. Regardless of which particular method he uses to fly, I am sure of one thing: whatever generates his flight ability runs on gas power. To sum it up, the play set's villains lineup looks like this: Dead Guy. Box Man with the Ice Cream Hair Sleepy Botanist Lady. Fart Man. When you have a sagging company (Disney Interactive) to save, and one chance to do it in, you generally don't put your faith into a bad guy with the superpower of passing gas. And to think this could have gone SO much better. Remember this guy? Clearly, there were initially plans to put him in the game. Why not? He would have been ten times better than what we got. So let's think about this. The Underminer is more than strong enough a villain to carry a story, so if he makes the play set, chances are, the dead guy never does. Plus, if the last week blog was true, than presumably, the fifth playable character would have been Frozone, not Syndrome. Surely, they wouldn't have made a figure for such an obscure character as The Underminer, so that leaves us at five figures, all heroes, set to battle The Underminer. Sounds pretty solid, right? So, why? Why on earth was The Underminer scrapped in favor of Dead Guy, Toots, and the others? Well, I would suggest it had something to do with this: #1: Disney Interactive had already toyed around with the idea of the battle between Mr. Incredible and The Underminer in another game, Rise of The Underminer. The ratings for that game seem to range from okay to good. Perhaps lack of perceived enthusiasm for the story and character, and having done something similar before, caused the developers to rethink their approach. The Disney Infinity play sets are all new storylines, anyway, with none following the storyline of the movie or any previous video game. Maybe they just wanted to be original. #2: As cool as that storyline and battle would have been, it had some gaps. The movie told very little of how The Underminer works. Who would be The Underminer's goons? If you simply reused the Underminer bots from the first video game, it would have felt like a cheap remake, not a new game. Maybe an army of mole bots? Replicas of the digging mech? And who would be his first mate, his second in command, his Mirage, if you will? These were questions easily answered if asked about Syndrome, but not so about The Underminer. #3: The biggest reason in my mind is money. Dead or alive, Syndrome is just a more popular character than Zone. Period. Take out Zone, add Syndrome as the villain and fifth playable character, and suddenly there was no room left for Mole Man. There is, however, another possible reason for the exclusion of the two supers. Pixar recently announced a new sequel to The Incredibles, aptly and cleverly named............. The Incredibles 2. If nothing else, Disney Infinity is a medium of promotion for future Disney productions, i.e. Frozen, Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Hero 6. Why would Disney not do the same here? Only one problem: almost all the characters from the movie have already been used, even the dead ones. Who is left to rep the new sequel in DI 4.0? I have an idea. Bring on the Zone. Plus, who knows? The new sequel's plot may even be based on the nefarious deeds of The Underminer! Would that be schweet or what? Finally getting to see for real what an underground Incredi-battle looks like! Although, of course, there's always the chance that Pixar decides to attempt to capitalize on the success of Disney Infinity by "borrowing" some of JV's vill-lames. Hopefully they resist the urges; otherwise, the reviews might look something like this: "The Hoarder did not capture the imagination; I was wishing he would put me in a box just so it would end." "Snoring Gloria. The name says it all.......Zzzzzzzzzz......." "Bomb Voyage made this whole movie smell like rotten eggs. It was a real stink bomb." Realistically, I expect the villain in the new movie to be either someone brand new, Bomb Voyage, or some cyborg incarnation of Mr. Oliver Sansweet, but The Underminer would be fun. Bring on the Gopher. Bring on the Fun. And, please, don't Bring on the Vill-lames and resurrected supers. Category:Blog posts